Well Apple has released a beta of Safari for Windows. Yes Safari is Apples very own browser, which they made in response to Internet Explorer maiming Netscape, then neglecting Mac. Its based on the KHTML rendering engine from the KDE project - but although still available under the LGPL and via CVS the two have diverged considerably.

But anyway back to Safari.

Since they have ported iTunes and continue to maintain it, one can safely assume that the nice developers at Apple have already crossed many of the larger bridges with porting apps from osx to windoze. So assuming a nice tool kit, it would seem that porting Safari wouldn't be as huge of a task.

What of Opera? People are still swearing by Opera, and i must agree that it is really a great browser. I use it on my mobile phone and look forward to a native linux-amd64 port. Opera has also found itself a huge market in portable and appliance type devices. So good on them, and thanks for bringing the technology to windows and linux (and others) for free. Keep up the good work. Opera really is a great browser.

There have been mixed reviews, as yes it is buggy and it does seem rather pointless to have yet another browser on windows. Firefox is quite nice and did make a big impact on the market. Certainly it spurred Internet Explorer development. But without being unkind, Firefox has lost its flair. Firefox isn't the spiffy little speed demon it used to be and anyone who has used Mozilla's Firefox, then compared it to the Iceweasel offshoot, will conclude with me that clearly there a lot of simple optimizations and patches that aren't being done for whatever reason.

So hello Safari and welcome to Windows.

It looks like it does on MacOSX, but its still that familiar browser interface. Safari is quick, but i dont know if its quicker than Opera - it does feel more dirty though. I dont mean because its a ported Apple application, but just because it seems to be doing fonts etc on its own, which just doesnt seem to be working quite right. It does have lots of spiffy eye candy like when you 'find' within a page. Also thus far i haven't found any websites that don't work nicely - which makes sense given that Safari has been around for a long time as a Mac application.

So even if it doesn't really bring that much to the table, web developers can be happy that they can test it on windows and its really not that big of a download.

However, Apple may be rattling the saber. There are plenty of other commercial apps that would be well received on windows. Garageband for example. So why not bring Safari over, build up porting experience, then send in the big guns later.